Want to be a backend architect ? learn : 1. Microservices Design Service decomposition, Bounded contexts, Resilience (Circuit Breaker, Bulkheads) 2. Distributed Systems Fundamentals CAP Theorem, Event sourcing, CQRS, Data consistency models (ACID vs. BASE) 3. High-Performance Data Management Database partitioning, Index optimization, NoSQL data modeling 4. Advanced API Design gRPC, GraphQL, API Gateways, Asynchronous APIs 5. Event-Driven Architecture Kafka, Message queues, Pub/Sub patterns, Saga pattern 6. Cloud-Native Patterns Container orchestration (Kubernetes), Serverless, Multi-cloud strategies 7. Observability Distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), Centralized logging (ELK), Real-time monitoring 8. Infrastructure as Code Terraform, Helm, Configuration management best practices 9. Advanced Security Zero Trust, OAuth2, JWT, Data encryption in transit and at rest 10. Scaling Strategies Load balancing, Sharding, Horizontal vs. vertical scaling